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As a software engineer at a company pushing AI use pretty heavily this whole thing is crazy making. If nothing else AI has some of the people that are the best at branding on its side. At least on the implementation side that I've done with copilot an "agent" and a "skill" are just markdown files. Their documentation is very clear about this.
The idea with a "skill" is there's some repeatable task you might want an AI to do and you hit on a particularly effective prompt that gets it to do the thing. You codify that prompt in a markdown file in a special directory. Then when you ask your more general session to do a thing it can look in that directory for applicable skills and if it thinks one is relevant it will inject its contents ss context.
"Agents" are similar. I thinks it's been known for a long time that if you prompt the AI a specific way ("You are a software engineer proficient in ...") they can perform better at certain tasks. Agents work on this principle. As best I can tell the use of an agent can either be selected by the user or your general AI might select one based on criteria similar to a skill. It then starts a sub-session where the contents of the agent markdown are injected as a kind of pre-prompt before your actual prompt.
So when you hear Anthropic has created a skill or agent or whatever that can do X you should mentally replace that with "wrote a markdown file." "Anthropic published a new skill that makes AI good at COBOL" == "Anthropic published a markdown file that, when injected in a session, makes an AI good at COBOL." Of course, things start sounding more insane. "Tech security stocks dropped on news Anthropic wrote a markdown file." "IBM dropped on news Anthropic wrote a markdown file."
There's a slight nuance in what the market is actual reacting to. The news, and I agree this was over determined so the stock market was really behind on it, is that creating that .md file worked at least well enough to be endorsed by anthropic. Anthropic could create a markdown file that instructs claude to instantly cure all disease and grant immortality but it wouldn't work so anthropic wouldn't endorse it as working and the market wouldn't move.
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